Untitled #753 1973

Camille Bryen made this untitled oil on canvas, measuring 46 by 38 centimeters, sometime during his career. Bryen was a key figure in the post-war French art scene, an advocate of lyrical abstraction. The painting has areas of subdued colour in mostly rectangular shapes, which gives a sense of order. However, the shapes are broken up by splatters of paint and chaotic lines that defy neat arrangement. Bryen was self-taught, so he had an outsider status to the formal French art establishment. In the 1940s, he became associated with the Lettrist movement, a group that sought to break with convention and create new kinds of art and poetry. In a France still recovering from the trauma of war, artists like Bryen felt compelled to invent a new visual language. The historian can look to manifestos and artists’ writings, exhibition catalogs, and critical reviews in order to better understand the context of this artwork and the artist’s intentions. The meaning of art is inseparable from the social and institutional conditions of its making.